The plans for this year's LHC run will see it accumulate three times the data …

Last week, the people running the LHC laid out plans for its 2012 schedule. In announcing the results of the 2011 run, physicists indicated that they would have enough data by the end of this year to know whether the Higgs boson exists at around 125GeV, where a tantalizing signal had been spotted. To make sure this comes to pass, the people running the LHC have laid out a schedule that will see the machine pump out three times as many collisions this year as it did in the one just passed. They'll also boost the energy slightly before sending the collider into an extended shutdown that will start next winter.

A catastrophic failure early in the LHC's history revealed a flaw in some of the superconducting hardware that helps keep the protons on track as they circle the accelerator. To compensate, the accelerator has been running with each beam at 3.5TeV (for a combined energy of 7TeV), half its design energy; an extended break would be required to replace the faulty hardware. At the reduced energy, however, the LHC has outperformed most people's expectations, placing a definitive answer on the Higgs within reach. That prospect has caused the LHC management to revise some of its plans in the expectation that the Higgs can be discovered or ruled out before the extended shutdown.

There are two ways to increase the chances of discovering new physics at the LHC. The first is to boost the energy, which opens up unexplored territory at the high end, and increases the frequency of interesting events at lower energies. The success of the 2011 run has convinced the LHC management that they can afford to boost the energy a bit, so each beam will be running at 4TeV in 2012. That adds a total of 1TeV to the collision energies, a 15 percent increase. It's not a huge change, but keeps the chances of another catastrophic failure acceptably low.

This should allow option number two to help out: boosting the rate of collisions. Protons circulate the LHC in bunches, and there are several ways to up the number of collisions that happen each time bunches cross paths. These include packing more protons in each bunch, squeezing the bunches down to a more compact cross-section, boosting the number of bunches in the ring, and decreasing the separation between bunches. Most of these approaches require changes through the entire LHC accelerator chain, and a bit of hands-on experience to pull off.

To gain that hands-on experience without disrupting the work, the team running the accelerator has introduced breaks in the middle of the schedule, as visible in the image below, which tracks the cumulative data obtained by the ATLAS detector (the flat sections are the breaks, during which no data is gathered). Each of the breaks represents time spent testing a new method of squeezing more collisions out of the same amount of time. You can see how successful those efforts were by comparing the slope of the final period to that of the first.

The data recorded by the ATLAS detector in 2011.

The LHC is designed to run with a 25 nanosecond gap between bunches, but the 2012 plans will see the spacing kept at its current figure, 50ns. That still leaves room for improvement in other areas. But, even without any additional boost, the LHC should start this year off at the high rate of collisions it achieved by the end of 2011. That alone will provide a significant increase in data gathering compared to last year.

So far, each year's improvements have exceeded the cautious expectations set during these meetings, so there's every reason to expect that the team will do so again this year. And, if anything goes wrong and the data it gathers aren't sufficient to pin down the Higgs by the end of this year, there's always the option of revising the schedule at next winter's meetings. That's what happened last year.